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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading On the horizon: an open graphics card (NewsForge)Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier takes a look at the Open Graphics Project (OGP). "The goal for the project is to create a video card at a reasonable price that is unencumbered by patents or other intellectual property, that has a fully documented programming interface, supports a full OpenGL implementation, offers good 2-D graphics performance, and supports video playback."
What AMD's ATI acquisition means for Linux (and Macs) (Linux-Watch)Linux-Watch looks at AMD's acquisition of ATI. "With AMD at the helm, I can envision ATI finally open-sourcing the code to its proprietary drivers. That should quickly result in much better performance for Linux users, and better performance for the Windows and Mac platforms as well."
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register)The Register reports that India has decided not to participate in the One Laptop Per Child project. "The Indian Ministry of Education dismissed the laptop as 'paedagogically suspect'. Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: 'We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.'" The article also notes that Nigeria has ordered one million OLPC systems.
Trade Shows and Conferences Day one at OSCON (NewsForge)NewsForge reports from O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON). "The eight annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) kicked off Monday at the Oregon Convention Center. The first two days at OSCON are all about tutorials, with half-day presentations by key contributors to open source projects discussing how to make use of their tools. OSCON has several tracks, including tracks for Web applications, databases, Perl, JavaScript and AJAX, Ruby, Linux, programming, and business."
OSCON day 2 (NewsForge)Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier reports from OSCON on NewsForge. "The highlight of the evening was Larry Wall's annual State of the Onion report. Ostensibly meant to be an update on the state of Perl, Wall's talk was about 90% entertainment and 10% status report on Perl 6. Wall noted that Perl was first released in 1987, and says that as Perl is approaching its 20th birthday, the language is 'growing up.' Though the Perl team has been reluctant to give timelines for Perl 6 to be finished, Wall says that we should have 'most of Perl 6' by Christmas. Though it probably won't be a final release, it looks as if Perl 6 might just be ready by the time the language turns 20."
Companies IBM extends support to Novell's SUSE Linux (CRN India)CRN India reports on IBM's plans to support SUSE Linux Enterprise 10. "IBM will support Xen technology as part of the Virtualization Engine portfolio on the company's Intel and Opteron processor based server and blade systems. Additionally, IBM has plans to support SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 from Novell across its entire hardware and software portfolio and provide services support."
Linux Adoption Govt. is the Best Bet For Linux in India, Too (ChannelTimes.com)ChannelTimes.com reports on the increasing use of Linux in government. "World over, the benefits of the open source system are increasingly being acknowledged by the government sector. In India, Red Hat and Novell, the two major players in open source technology, confirmed the importance of its adoption in the government sector. Sandeep Menon, director-sales, Linux West Asia Business, Novell, said, "Novell benefits whenever an effort is made to promote open source systems because more than half of its large Linux engagements are with the government and public sector.""
Free and Open Source Software at the United Nations (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet looks at how United Nations agencies use free and open source software. "Advances in technology have revolutionized the way people live, learn and work, but these benefits have not spread around the world evenly. A digital divide exists between communities in their access to computers, the Internet, and other technologies. The United Nations is aware of the importance of including technology development as part of a larger effort to bridge this global digital divide. This article looks at how various United Nations agencies use free and open source software to meet the goal of putting technology at the service of people around the world."
Linux at Work Linux-powered robots from France? Oui! (LinuxDevices)LinuxDevices looks at the Aldebaran "Nao" robot. "Aldebaran says its "Nao" household robot will compete with robotic research prototypes in terms of functionality. The walking, talking, WiFi-enabled bot will stand 21.6 inches tall, and will feature 23 "degrees of freedom" of motion -- three more than the 14-inch tall "Choromet" android announced earlier this week by four Japanese companies. Nao's extra degrees of freedom appear to come in the form of gripping hands."
Interviews An Interview with the Creator of FreeSWITCH (O'ReillyNet)The O'Reilly Network talks with Anthony Minessale, the developer of the FreeSWITCH telephony application. "Despite the fact that I have contributed a sizeable list of features to Asterisk, working around the politics was almost harder than working around some of the shortcomings in the design. I have raised FreeSWITCH up from scratch in only one-third of the time I had previously spent working on just adding things to a fully-functional Asterisk."
Ubuntu heads for the mainstream (Register)The Register talks with Mark Shuttleworth. "One of the really interesting questions we got when we made the Sun announcement was, do you think it will hurt your community credentials if you start working with Sun, IBM, HP and so on? So it is very important to our business model that that not be the case. Because much of the value of Ubuntu lies in the fact that it's collaboratively produced with the community."
Jani Monoses (Behind Ubuntu)Behind Ubuntu interviews Xubuntu hacker Jani Monoses. "Who is the target audience for Xubuntu? Is it mainly for people with older or slower machines also what features do you think might appeal to current Gnome and KDE users? Initially it was meant as a clean and maintainable distro for machines with less memory. However it turned out to be a very good fit for thin client deployments as well. Existing experienced Gnome and KDE users may find its relative speed and simplicity appealing, but this is a matter of taste mostly. The main target are still those machines where KDE and Gnome do not run acceptably well."
Packt Publishing announces Open Source CMS Award (NewsForge)NewsForge talks with Damian Carvill about Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award. "NF: How will the entries be sorted and shortlisted? DC: We want as many open source CMSes to enter as possible through the nomination process. We don't expect the judges to plough through hundreds of nominated entries, which is why only the five with the most nominations will go through to the final. I can see how this can be misconstrued as a popularity contest by default, but we felt that this was the best way to arrange it."
Resources Rumblings From Studio Dave (Linux Journal)Dave Phillips rambles about audio and 64-bit Linux. "As I mentioned at the end of my last entry I've preparing myself for my first excursion into the world of 64-bit Linux. After trading some lessons for a motherboard I started collecting parts for a new desktop machine for the studio. 64-bit considerations were new to me so I asked for help on the Linux Audio Users mail list. Some LAU members run 64-bit systems, and I did indeed get the information I needed. I won't detail the engaging traffic that resulted from that thread, you can read it yourself in the LAU list archives (it's titled AMD64 question)."
System Administration: Another Step toward the BIND (Linux Journal)Linux Journal looks at the named.conf file used by BIND. "As we've said previously, Linux distributions come with BIND, an application that runs the vast majority of all DNS servers. BIND runs a service or daemon called named. It's primary configuration file is called named.conf. (We assume that you know that Linux services or daemon's have configuration files associated with them.)"
System Administration: Another Step toward the BIND (Linux Journal)Linux Journal presents part 2 and part 3 in a look at BIND. From part 3: "The early information contained in the primary zone file exists to accommodate your secondary or slave server. That's BIND for you. When you look at the SOA entry you will see the information for the secondary server in lines 2 through 6."
Enlightenment 17 QuickStart Guide (HowtoForge)HowtoForge has published a QuickStart Guide for the Enlightenment 17 window manager. "Enlightenment 17 or E17 as it is generally called, is a cool Window Manager for X. The latest stable version of Enlightenment is E16 (0.16.8.1). In this article we will talk about the latest CVS build available (0.16.999.023)."
Five Power Tips for Thunderbird (Summersault Weblog)Mark Stosberg was a demanding mutt user. Now he has some tips for switching to Thunderbird. "As an internet professional, I use e-mail constantly. Mutt, a popular e-mail client for command line geeks had been wearing on me. I found Thunderbird 1.5 a capable replacement for my needs, and have since cut the average size of my Inbox in half."
Live migration of Xen domains (Linux.com)Linux.com shows how to migrate virtual machines while they are running using VM migration. "Virtualization is all the rage these days. Advances in x86 performance, as well as the increasing energy requirements of servers, make efficiently provisioning machines a necessity. Xen, an open source virtual machine (VM) monitor, works with just about any Linux distribution. One useful feature for shops that care about high availability is Xen's ability to migrate virtual machines while they are running. By using VM migration, you can pool computing resources just as you can pool storage. Here's how."
Reviews What Is Geronimo? (O'ReillyNet)Kunal Jaggi takes a look at Apache Geronimo, an open-source, Java EE-compatible application server. "Based in an integration of best-of-breed open source technologies, and with a vibrant and thriving community backing a certified open source server, Geronimo is set to take the enterprise market by storm. This article will introduce you to Geronimo and give you the basics you need for developing and deploying a simple Java EE web application on Geronimo."
Taking Microsoft's ODF Plugin for a Spin... Splat (Groklaw)Groklaw looks at the results of Rob Weir's tests of Microsoft's Open Document Format (ODF) plugin. "To test conversion fidelity, first he created an ODF document in OpenOffice.org. So that's how it's supposed to look. The original as ODF is there on his blog too. Next, he opens this ODF document in Word 2007 using their plugin. Take a look at the results. Look what happened to his poor ODF document in Word 2007. It's an absolute mess. Why? What is Microsoft's excuse for such shoddy output, when they have, right now, all the documentation and even the source code to work with -- their own and everything from the ODF side too?"
Gimmie a new panel prototype (Linux.com)Linux.com covers Gimmie, Alex Graveley's re-imagined desktop panel project. "Core desktop interface elements such as menus and panels are frequently targets for revision and replacement, owing to their importance and the difficulty of developing a best-fit-for-the-most-users design. In a GUADEC 2006 presentation (the notes for which are available in PDF at the Gimmie Web site), Graveley enumerates some problems marked for attention. Among them are the underutilization of "recently used" lists for applications and documents, the inflexibility of system menus, and the ambiguity of icons -- some are launchers, some are representations of running apps, etc."
WiFi Radar eases connectionsJoe Barr reviews WiFi Radar on Linux.com. "WiFi Radar is a handy tool for those who move from one wireless access point (AP) to another. My laptop regularly connects to a wireless AP on my home LAN, to a free wireless service in downtown Austin where we hold our weekly LUG meetings, and to whatever is available at airports and hotels when I'm on the road. WiFi Radar makes it simple to switch connections no matter where I am."
High-speed analog data acquisition module runs Linux (LinuxDevices)LinuxDevices reviews the Pentland RAD-2 PMC data acquisition board. "Pentland says its RAD-2 PMC features dual-channel, 14-bit resolution, with up to 105MSPS sampling speed and 16 individual down-converter channels. Other features include a 64-bit, 66MHz PCI bus, for high-bandwidth transfers, on-board DMA, and a Xilinx Virtex II FPGA for post-acquisition DSP (digital signal processing)."
Linux on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet reviews the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. "The Nokia 770 is an internet tablet designed to connect to the internet with 802.11b/g WLAN or through a phone with Bluetooth. It has a nice 800 x 480 screen (64k colors) and quite a few apps on board. The underlying OS is the Debian GNU/Linux derivative, BusyBox. As it stands, the device is not a phone."
R Cubed's thin, fast Linux notebook (NewsForge)NewsForge reviews a Linux powered laptop. "The LS1250-L is a good example of a Linux notebook that is both lightweight and small in size, while having a reasonable heat signature. Anybody that travels knows that weight kills, when it comes to lugging around your suitcase and mobile computer. The R Cubed notebook has just the right amount of heft to make it feel durable. By itself the 11x9x1.5-inch LS1250-L weighs in at a svelte 3.62lbs. Add 14 ounces for the power brick and cord combination, and you have a slim back-friendly Linux computing package."
Miscellaneous A Galician Government Representative Meets KDE Translators (KDE.News)KDE.News covers a language translation effort. "Last Saturday, a representative from the Galician Government in Spain met members of the Trasno project. This project includes Free Software volunteer translators for the Galician language, from a wide range of Free software projects including KDE. The government representative was Mr. Antonio Pérez Casas, Adviser for the Information Society of the Industry and Innovation Councillor. Six people came to the meeting from the Trasno team including Xavier García Feal, coordinator of the KDE galician language team, two other KDE translators, a couple of translators from Gnome and the author of the Galician ispell dictionaries."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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